2. God

The Mystery of God

 

Religion has presented to us several images and attributes of God. However, the interpretation of the nature and origin of God varies, with some even claiming that it is only their God that is true and real. Even within the Judeo-Christian-Islam tradition, we find these diverse and conflicting interpretations. The incongruences make it quite hard for an ordinary seeker of truth to know who the real God is. Historians of ancient texts later discovered the causes of these varying interpretations with disturbing implications.

On the other hand, mainstream science is not that interested in the issue of God, contending that this term is highly metaphysical and spiritual which are not within its expertise and jurisdiction. Conventional science believes that the Cosmos is purely material and physical. If there is God, then, its nature and origin are subject to the laws of nature and its existence will eventually be discovered in the laboratories.

Let me examine these two views further below.

The God of Religion

Stories and myths about the nature, attributes, and origin of God abound in history. One legend is that a group of elite humans, having become intelligent, shrewd, and cunning, created divine entities that are bigger and more powerful than them to whom they could turn in times of need. They called these human-made creatures Gods and Goddesses. In doing so, early Kings and Rulers evaded their subjects’ wrath and ire of misery and suffering by simply blaming all this on their Gods and Goddesses.

Another version has it that the Cosmos already existed from the very beginning. From available resources, Zeus, the most prominent Egyptian Pantheon of the Gods, created man to feed his immortality and power. Nevertheless, humanity grew restless because they were made primarily to work as enslaved people in the mines and rivers, doing all the work for their divine masters.

Unable to subdue their rebellion, the Gods and Goddesses convened and decided to make creatures from the beasts of the land by reengineering their genes and DNAs. Through genetic manipulation, they mass-produced Homo sapiens sapiens to do their work. This is how humans came to be—we were created in the image and likeness of the Gods and Goddesses to honor and serve them.

However, who are these Gods and Goddesses that religion is talking about?

Zechariah Sitchin, a highly respected Bible scholar who studied economics at the University of London, uncovered another version of how the term God came to be. In his research, he found the word God, or Yahweh, in today’s Christian Bibles, resulted from a mistranslation of the term Elohim in the Hebrew Book of Genesis.

According to him, Elohim is plural and used to represent femininity. Its singular term is “L”, a Semitic word that means masculinity. However, according to him,  Elohim refers to the royal family of the Anunnaki (literally, “those who from heaven came”), headed by the Patriarch Anu who was addressed as “The Shining One,” “The Source of Brilliance,” “The Source of Intelligence,” and “The Source of Light.” Later, Elohim was translated as Lord instead of “The Shining One”, notwithstanding the fact that the term Elohim is plural.

The Anunnaki people were extraterrestrial beings inhabiting the planet Nibiru. They were not metaphysical or spiritual figures. Nibiru orbits our Sun every 3,600 years. They were not Gods and Goddesses but human beings like us. However, mainly because of their height, size, stature, and strength, the native Sumerians believed they were divine beings from a different dimension. Over a short period, they were referred to as “The Mighty Ones,” “The Sky Gods and Goddesses,” “The Star Gods and Goddesses,” “The Gods and Goddesses of the Heavens,” “Sky People,” “The Star People,” or even “Children of Heaven”. According to many historians, it is here where the most significant mistranslations in the Earth chronicle began, and people continue to use these mistranslations even today.

Other authors gave parallel interpretations of the term Elohim. One of the most prominent is Mauro Biglino, an Italian author and renowned translator of Hebrew, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Italian scripts. According to him, the term “God” is an incorrect theological translation of the term “Elohim,” a plural term meaning “Gods,” often singularly used as Eloha” and related to “El” who became “Allah” to the Muslims.

Biglino said that there are so many Elohim in the Bible but there is no God. Based on the context then, Elohim may either refer to the Patriarch Yahweh, or foreign deities like the Moabite God Chemosh, the Sidonian Goddess Astarte, angels, or mortals such as the judges or kings, like King Xerxes I for the Persians, or the Pharaohs for the Ancient Egyptians. He admonished that we should consider the literal side of the Bible rather than color it with our subjective theological and philosophical interpretations.

According to Biglioni, becoming all-powerful and all-knowing are theological concepts based on extra-philosophical conjectures of translating God as the Creator of the universe. However, in many cases, the Bible itself disproves this. He cites several biblical passages showing that Yahweh is not God. The reader may refer to his video titled “Elohim - Finally, We Know The Truth! Vatican Bible Translator Reveals Shocking Information! Ep 1.” It is a must for those desiring to deepen their knowledge in addition to what is sketchily narrated here. I encountered this video only at the time of this writing. It was 12:30 in the morning and for the next few days, I put all my focus and attention to it, verifying it with the narratives and presentations of other internationally known biblical historians.

Another ancient historian Paul Wallis observed that the mistranslation could have resulted from viewing the Bible as a story of God, when in fact it is a story of the 12 nations of Israel. Wallis is an internationally bestselling author, researcher, and scholar of ancient Hebrew and mythologies. For many years, he worked for Rome’s Saint Paul Press as a Bible translator, providing with great precision the literal meaning of Hebrew words for Vatican-approved interlinear Bibles.

As a senior churchman, Paul served as a Church Doctor, a Theological Educator, and an Archdeacon in the Anglican Church in Australia. His work in church ministry has included training pastors in translating and interpreting biblical texts that revealed a forgotten layer of ancient stories. His works revealed that mistranslations have had far-reaching implications for our understanding of God as well as our origins and place in the Cosmos.

According to him, the root meanings of a series of keywords in the Bible reveal an earlier layer of information very different from the story of God associated with the Bible. But this was hidden from the public for centuries by mistaken translations and the dogmas of the Church. His findings showed that the term Yahweh is a non-existent, unjustified, and mistaken translation.

To substantiate his finding, Wallis brings our attention to the Ten Commandments wherein Yahweh sees himself as an Elohim: “You must have no other Elohim before me. Do not work for them, certainly don’t bow down to them and you can’t even paint pictures of them. Moreover, it is there when Joshua says, don’t serve the Elohim of Egypt or the Canaanites or of your ancestors in Mesopotamia. Serve only Yahweh.” Then, according to him, Yahweh, a simple King, made himself God or Elohim to his people many times. The absurdity that Yahweh refers to just one person while Elohim is plural has not been questioned by theologians, philosophers, and exegetes for more than 2,600 years.

In a joint video, Biglino and Wallis expressed that there were other Elohim in the Bible, such as the one told in the story of King Isaiah. When Yahweh’s King Ahziah fell off a ladder and broke his back. he wanted to know if he was dying so he sent his messengers to Ekron to inquire of the Elohim of Ekron, the powerful one of Ekron, who he believed could give an accurate prognosis. And when Yahweh heard of this, he was furious. According to his spokesman, Yahweh says: “Is there no Elohim here that Ahzian has to go running after the Elohim?”

So many other sources also speak of the mis-transliteration of the term Elohim. One authoritative source is the University of California, Los Angeles Cuneiform Digital Library initiative, which makes the form and content of ancient Sumerian cuneiform texts available online.

Another literature, perhaps one of the most revered books that spoke about God, is the Book of Enoch, which predates the Genesis story about Elohim. The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) was believed to be written in Aramaic. The first-century Christians even accepted the Book of Enoch as inspired, if not authentic. But after several transmissions and translations through various languages and cultures, all of these translations appear today with many changes and alterations.

At the time before the Great Flood, the Book of Genesis tells the story of Enoch, who, after living for 365 years, was taken by God to heaven (Genesis 5:23-24). However, it does not tell us much about what happened to Enoch when he was taken to heaven. The details of the event are recorded in The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (William Richard Morfill and Robert Henry Charles, found in Russia and Serbia and preserved in the Slavonic language. Ancient theorists believe that Enoch’s story was used by early Christians and remained significant in the study of Christianity.

As the account goes, two men woke Enoch, admonishing him not to fear because God sent them to accompany him to heaven (Chapter 1). While with the Lord and the angels, Enoch directly received knowledge and wisdom. He was entrusted with the secrets of heaven and earth. In quick succession of events, the two men showed him the order of stars, the angels who ruled them (Chapter IV), the treasure-houses of the dew, and how all the flowers of the earth were made to shut and open (Chapter VI).

In no time, Enoch learned about the structure of the Cosmos, science, and mathematics, as well as the dynamics of the constellations, stars, suns, moons, and Earth (Chapters XI to XV). In the process, he learned about the twelve gates (corresponding to the 12 months of the year) and the number of days assigned to each gate, with a total of 365 and quarter days of the solar year. He was brought to the second heaven that houses the fallen angels (Chapter VII), the place of the righteous and compassionate (Chapter IX), and other higher realms.

Then, Archangel Michael brought him before the Lord who summoned one of His Archangels, Pravuel, the keeper of knowledge and wisdom, to bring out the books and a reed of quick-writing to be delivered and given to Enoch so the latter can take down notes in his own handwriting (Chapter XII). The angel told him about the beginnings and workings of the heavens, earth, and sea, their passages and goings, the thunders, the sun and moon, stars, the seasons, years, days, and hours among many others (Chapter XXIII).

Surrounded by troops of Cherubim and Seraphim and in the presence of Archangel Gabriel, the Lord himself revealed to Enoch the great secrets of God, telling him how He created everything and all the forces that regulate it and that He, “the Self-eternal, not made with hands, and without change” existed from the beginning even before everything was created. When everything was finished, the Lord commanded the two angels to accompany Enoch down to earth, taking with him the books so that Enoch could relay what he learned from the Lord to his sons.

The Lord also instructed Enoch to distribute the books and the notes written in his handwriting to his sons and their children and hand these down to the next generations, nation to nation (Chapter XXXIII). Enoch did what the Lord had commanded him to do and passed the books to them as his legacy to the coming generations (Chapter LIV).

How the people learned the secrets of the heavens and the underworld, as well as biology, chemistry, and mathematics also appears in the story of Enmeduranki, whose life parallels the life of the biblical Enoch. It leads many scholars to believe that the two are the same personality. Like Enoch, Enmeduranki was given the “Tablet of the Gods” and the secrets of the gods.

Initially, the Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) used the term” the Elect One” sitting on the throne of glory trying the works of the righteous in their places of rest (Enoch 45:3). However, Luke 1:32 changed this to refer to the Most High, the Lord God, who will give to the Son of the Most High the throne of his father David, and that his kingdom will never end. In Luke 9:35, we also find the statement “Son of the Most High” translated to: “This is my beloved Son. Hear him.”

What about Elohim, the God attributed to YHWH?

As described in the Book of Giants, the term Elohim can be better understood if taken within its context. The term refers to one of the fallen angels Nephilim, transcribed as Giants in the Old Testament Bible. As the story goes, the Nephilim were sons of the Watchers, who are all demons. Two hundred of them descended to Earth, with one leader for every 20 Watchers, supposedly to protect Earth and humanity.

However, they disregarded their duties because they could not resist the beauty of human women. So, they seduced them and had sex with them. In the process, the Nephilim revealed to humanity the secrets and power of the angels and God. Moreover, the Watchers subjugated the human race, killing hundreds of thousands of the righteous in battle, forcibly marrying beautiful women, practicing magic, and enslaving the nations. To avoid the wrath of God, they hid themselves among humans to keep the God-sent angels from finding them. It was called “veiling”.

These angered the angels and God. Enoch warned that their (Watchers) coming will lead only to “hurting speech” and “hard labor.” The Watchers were so evil that they were considered to be Satan-like. Enoch forewarned the demons that they would be placed in fire and taken to face eternal damnation. Although the Watchers and Giants asked for forgiveness and peace, Enoch told them God had declared there would be “no peace to you.”

It now becomes clearer that the Elohim were fallen angels condemned by God to eternal damnation. However, although the term refers to the fallen angels, Elohim, Giants, and the Watchers, YHWH proclaimed himself Elohim, as one God, one hidden secret that veiled the mystery of God.

Dr. Gene Kim of the Open Bible Baptist Church of Sydney, Australia, gives a similar and thorough presentation of the Nephilim as a product of his intense research in ancient writings. According to him, the Nephilim originally were the Sons of God, referred to in the Book of Genesis as the Giants and Watchers, riding on chariots and spaceships (UFOs), to protect humanity from temptations and falling into sin. However, they intermingled and intermarried with humanity’s beautiful sons and daughters and bore children that continued to multiply (Gen. 6:1-8). Not only this, they also committed other crimes and immoral acts similar to what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah.

What was abominable to the Lord was that they also cohabited with the beasts, producing offspring that were half-human and half-animal (Jude 3-14). We are reminded of such strange beings as the Sphinx, Medusa, centaurs, witches, mermaids, and other hybrid creatures that are half-human and half-animal. Historians say that while these mythical beings may appear only in mythologies, they cannot just come out of nowhere. They have their bases in reality.

In the Book of Genesis, God was so angered that it promised to punish not just the men and women who committed and perpetrated such acts but also the animals. He went to the extent of wiping out the entire Sodom and Gomorrah as well as the entire humanity by sending the Great Flood during the time of Noah.

The story about God is widespread. Every culture talks about Gods and Goddesses, the Garden of Paradise, Giants, Nephilim, the Great Flood, and Sky People cohabiting with the daughters of humanity and animals in their creation stories. Countries and nations likewise share these kinds of stories. They are not only in the Bible but also in ancient texts written in clay tablets sculpted in hieroglyphs and cave paintings that are preserved and narrated in almost all cultures, races, and countries across the globe.

The wrath of God was so severe that he was also too willing to scatter his people across the globe during the time of Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorrah, and during the time of Noah so that the Nephilim and their children would totally vanish from the face of the earth. A few must have survived but they know God and his angels are hunting them. So, many of the survivors must have been hiding by now or masking the faces of human beings and are with us in governments, Churches, Temples, Mosques, mass media, and movies, intent on perpetuating their dastardly acts of manipulating humanity and controlling the world.

Yet, why are our national leaders in various sectors of societies across the globe so selective about their beliefs in what is written and not written in the Bible? Why are some religions deifying fake and evil deities, claiming them as Gods when they are fallen angels, and deceiving us by labeling the true God as fake and imaginary? Is this a result only of mistranslations and transliterations? There are no other explanations. Yet the incongruousness of it still remains, ignored by many philosophers, theologians, exegetes, as well as quantum scientists, cosmonauts, astronomers, cosmologists, neuroscientists, medical surgeons, biologists, hypnotherapists. One other explanation is perhaps the greed for power and control the power-that-be holds over their innocent citizenry.

The God of Science

Science argues that we do not need God to explain the universe. The Cosmos existed with a built-in mechanism to self-create, self-sustain, self-propel, self-reproduce, and even self-destruct. It possesses the power to create the planets, suns, stars, and galaxies from which the basic ingredients of earthly life were incubated. The Cosmos has always existed and has no need for any God.

The ancient philosophers have been right all along. In ancient times, Aristotle did not talk about God. He conceived of an eternal substance that is immune to change, decay, and death. He termed it the Unmoved Mover or Prime Mover which is the origin and source, out of which nothing would have existed. Aristotle opined that this Primal Source moves by itself and, simultaneously, it is the purpose (telos) of its movement. It is the cause and reason of all that exists, the Alpha and the Omega which is necessarily perfect. It is the Universal Force moving and orbiting at a constant speed within their respective stations (similar to what is known today as gravity). It is the common source of all finite substances.

These descriptions of substance lead Aristotle later to attribute the Prime Mover as God. However, according to him, God has no interest in the Cosmos. The Cosmos is in space, time, and matter but God is not. He is an outsider and located in some state of existence behind all that is happening in the Cosmos, perfectly delighted to be communing with itself.

Aristotle described the motions of Earth and heavenly bodies as moving continuously towards or away from the Earth and journeying in circles into the heavens. While motion in the heavens is indefinite, motion on Earth is limited and imperfect since, according to him, Earth is finite. In his time, Earth was viewed as the center of the universe.

Fast forward, Newton, devoutly and studiously Christian, offered a more unorthodox view of the personhood of God. He was Unitarian and thought that being a Trinitarian was a sin because, according to him, there is no mention of Trinity in the Bible. He believed in using the plain language of the Bible and that reason should not be used to interpret scripture. However, he did not separate science from religion or God. He felt that science and scientific laws reflect God’s image. While modern scientists claiming to be atheists see the scientific laws as the be-all and end-all, Newton saw God’s hand in all of science. Michio Kaku concurs:

I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, everything that we call chance today won’t make sense anymore. To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.

Paramahansa Yogananda, a contemporary of Albert Einstein, likewise expressed a similar view: “The intelligent cosmic energy of Aum that issues forth from God, and is the manifestation of God, is the creator and substance of all matter.” However, Einstein had some doubts. He believed the problem of God was the “most difficult in the world”, asserting that a simple yes or no cannot just answer questions about God because “the problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.” Nevertheless, Einstein did not skirt the issue of God. However, if there is God, he did not believe in a personal or anthropomorphic God. As he put it: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

Similarly, Theoretical Physicist, Mathematician, and Cosmologist Stephen Hawking opined that if God indeed exists, we do not really know his reasons. Hawking was a hardcore atheist, rejecting the Abrahamic God: “The question is, is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can’t understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second. If you like, you can call it the laws of ‘God’, but it wouldn’t be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to.”

Nobel Laureate Theoretical Physicist Richard Philipps Feynman was an atheist too and does not believe in the Abrahamic anthropomorphic God. However, he said there can be no inconsistency between believing in science and believing in God.  

I do not believe that science can disprove the existence of God (in the traditional Abrahamic view); I think that is impossible. And if it is impossible, is not a belief in science and in a God … a consistent possibility? Yes, it is consistent. Despite the fact that I said that more than half of the scientists don’t believe in God, many scientists do believe in both science and God, in a perfectly consistent way.

For more than two decades, scientists have been looking for the key that could unlock the mysteries and secrets behind God’s nature, origin, and attributes. In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton acknowledged a Cosmic Force that regulates the orbital motion of all the known planets in our solar system. However, being brought up by an Anglican family and a devout Christian, he attributed the beginning of everything to a metaphysical God, contending that the Cosmos needs an external force who acts as a re-winder of the clock once the Cosmos diminishes its power or else, the whole creation would end with a mechanical whimper. In this manner, Newton was able to mix science and religion.

The French Mathematician Laplace, however, disagreed after observing that the planets, stars, and galaxies will not mechanically run down because the Cosmos is a self-regulating, self-correcting, and self-sustaining system whose future can be predicted with greater mathematical consistency. This led him to conclude that there is no longer any need for the God Hypothesis. In fact, he contended that science could theoretically explain everything since the whole universe was totally predetermined and mathematically predictable.

Max Planck, the founder of quantum physics, resurrected Newton’s idea of a Cosmic Force. He labeled it as the “Cosmic Mind and Intelligence,” which is the Matrix of All Matter.

Physicists are today obsessed with finding the Theory of Everything, a theory that could explain everything down to its deepest level. Many believe that their research in the quantum world would lead them to discover a particle that could explain everything in the Cosmos, including the existence of God. They termed this ultimate particle “Higgs boson” after its proponent, Peter Higgs.

Ecstatic, they jovially referred to this atomic element as the “God Particle,” confident that if God really exists, they would eventually find it in their laboratories. However, they were wrong because they discovered particles even smaller, finer, and subtler than the Higgs boson but did not correspond to the God Particle they had been watching for decades. Finding the Higgs boson is like looking for a needle in a vast haystack lying across the vast arena of the cosmic energy field. Until today, much subtler particles keep on emerging. The much-touted and sought-after particle still needs to be discovered. The race to find the God Particle is still ongoing.

However, their persistent efforts bring a sigh of relief. Recent discoveries detected the existence of this elusive particle, giving hope that it would not be long before they will finally discover God. Even then, I believe this will not lift the veil that hides the entire secrets of God. I surmise that its discovery might only open up new intriguing avenues and horizons about the nature, origin, attributes, and power of God.

Unveiling the mystery of God will remain a never-ending story.